


Moving On

by entirely_the_wrong_sort



Series: The Early Years: Drabbles [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Background Sam, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Motel life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 06:47:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8522731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entirely_the_wrong_sort/pseuds/entirely_the_wrong_sort
Summary: Dean contemplates the nature of motels as he listens through the wall.





	

Dean can’t sleep. He lies on a springy mattress listening to the hitched crying of a woman through the faded floral wall. 

It’s two in the morning. Her muffled sobs replaced the confused, cranky bawling of a travel-weary child about an hour and a half ago. Dean is all too familiar with those kinds of temper tantrums. In the bed next to his, Sam is dead to the world; doped full of pain-killers, sleeping off the drama of the hunt and their subsequent home surgery, wrapped in as many soft furnishings as Dean could muster up. Dean’s own bed is stripped bare - either re-purposed for Sam, or blood-stained and soaking in bleach in the avocado bathtub.

It had taken the woman next door a long time to get the kid to sleep; obviously, neither of them are used to the motel life. He listens to her crying in the semi-darkness now and wonders about his neighbours. Where they are going, where they are leaving, if they even know themselves. He wonders if they will miss wherever they had been, or if wherever they had been will miss them.

But the nature of motels means that he will never know. Neighbours for a night and strangers still. Here, in this liminal space on the edge of nowhere, each room is a pocket of a separate universe, the dividing wall as effective as an ocean. 

Perhaps that’s exactly what she’s counting on, Dean thinks to himself on his side of the wall. This sobbing woman with her sleeping child outside of reality, beyond notice. He wouldn’t be surprised if he was the only person to ever listen through these walls, to ever hear this woman’s private weeping.

Dean wonders if he had ever had a transient neighbour listen to him and his brother through cardboard thin walls. If anyone had ever contemplated what could possibly drive someone to bring children to a place beyond the reach of civilisation, outside the flow of normal time, with a dead possum rotting beneath the dried leaves and broken tiles of the pool outside the window. Or had they simply turned up the volume on their colour TV and moved on in the morning? Just walked past the room with the sound of children play-fighting and put the deserted parking lot in their rear-view mirror without a second thought?

Dean looks over at Sam as next door lets out a particularly badly stifled sob. He doesn’t even twitch. He’d never had much trouble sleeping in motel beds, even without the help of medication. 

Dean shakes his head. Of course they had never had an eavesdropping neighbour. If someone had been listening, perhaps Sam wouldn’t be so comfortable as an adult wrapped in itchy blankets on a fifteen year old mattress. Perhaps Dean wouldn’t find it so hard to sleep more than four hours a night. Perhaps the genuine highlight of their week wouldn’t be a shower with decent water pressure. Perhaps they would, at least once in their lives, ever signed a document with their own names. 

A lot of things might have been very different if someone had been listening.

Right now, Dean is listening through a wall, and he hopes things are going to be different for this tired woman and her tired child. He isn’t going to just walk past the door and leave them in the rear-view mirror without at least letting her know that she wasn’t here in this non-place alone. That she doesn’t have to save her crying for two in the morning within that lonely, poorly-decorated bubble universe. That he listened and he _heard_ them.

It’s ten to three by the time she’s cried herself to sleep, and Dean lets himself grab a couple of hours before starting a long day on the road to the next nowhere in particular. 

At six o’clock, when he leaves the room to load up the impala with blood stained rags and weaponry, Baby’s sitting alone in the lot. Their neighbours had already moved on. Where to, and in what state, he would never know. But that’s the nature of motels.

-

Sam winces and gripes in the seat next to him about where the hell they’re going to find breakfast out here in the middle of nowhere and doesn’t notice that Dean’s attention lingers on the vacancy sign shining brightly for no one at all in the rear-view as he pulls onto the open road, not a trace of another soul for miles. It all feels so familiar, the routine of leaving. Of vanishing without a trace.

Dean wonders how many times his single-serving neighbours had listened through the wall and wanted to, even _planned_ to say something, but come morning, the impala had already moved on.


End file.
